Off Season Project

My "off season project" is near complete. I have essentially burned my physical video library of DVDs to a 1.5 Terabyte external hard drive as a backup against scratches or loss.

It may seem like a lot of unnecessary work, but searching, organizing, and keeping up with over 453 NCAA/NFL game film DVDs (plus a few hundred clinic discs) can be tedious and subject to error. I had no real feasible method other than to store the discs on large disc spindles, which began taking up more and more physical space. It was herding cats to find a disc (even after having grouped spindles by categories), then to go through the process of creating a copy was worse.


Now, once I receive a disc, I just pop it in the drive, rip the ISO image to my portable hard drive and store it away as a master disc.

It also makes providing copies for other coaches that much easier, too. I just pull from the ISO image catalog, pop in a blank disc, and burn....done. This way, the bookshelf full of DVDs, the entire collection is available on a paperback-sized drive, available to take with me anywhere and burn (dvd-ready discs) anywhere with a DVD-RW drive.

I have toyed with the notion of ripping the complete video files entirely as .avi / mpegs and store on a HD to viewed via a media sharing network, but it is completely limited to the DLNA/LAN where it is set up and not as practical as just throwing in the original DVD.

1. Open DVD Decrypter

2. Select MODE (ISO) > Read (the DVD you have in the drive)

3. Choose where you what the disc image written to ......

4. Hit the Graphic at the bottom.................done

To burn, just do the opposite (Write > source [local storage] to destination [DVD] ).